3.18.2013

tot school - 20 months

The past two weeks in Tot School were spent wrapping up our unit on colors and, behind the scenes, brainstorming and planning for our letters unit that kicks off on Monday. I've been excitedly waiting for our turn to begin letters after falling in love with reading Nicole at The Kavanaugh Report's letter lessons with her little guy, Henry. Our Tot School classroom is currently filled with some fabulous tot trays and fun projects for the letter A, and I can't wait to begin!

But, anyway, the past two weeks were spent finishing up colors. I don't think we really needed two full weeks to devote to wrapping up colors, but it's been a crazy couple of weeks and this gave us some tranquil, peaceful time to dip back into colors before moving on. We didn't really have any tot trays for our "color closure" and it was apparent Ethan really missed them. He'd find the empty trays and try to stack things on them or bring them to me and ask "more?"

Ethan has been really into pointing out mommies and babies lately, so I made a little baby caterpillar and a mommy caterpillar using different colors. We did this one a couple of different ways each day. The first time, I just gave Ethan the colored circles and let him match them up. The second time, I'd ask him to point to each color and then we'd place the corresponding color on together. The third time, I gave him the duplicate color circles to hang onto and would ask for him to match a specific color -- as in, "can you match the green circle?" He nailed this activity -- and loved it!

We spent a lot of time the past two weeks making art. One of Ethan's favorite things to do was make these beautiful (no, really, they truly were pretty!) paintings on aluminum foil. We mixed red watercolors with some glue and some saltwater and Ethan went to work painting the aluminum foil. He seemed to really love smashing the foil up, unrolling it and continuing to paint. These looked really cool once they dried, and I'm cringing that the only photographic evidence of this activity I have hails from Instagram. I swore I'd never become reliant on this silly iPhone!

We spent some time making a special place on our art wall using all of the colors that we'd learned. The print-outs come from Twisty Noodle and I tried to make each color a little more unique and different from the last:

For the...Red Apple - Ethan used a Do-A-Dot marker, red star stickers and glued some dyed red macaroni for textureBlue Bike - Ethan used a sponge stamper with blue paint (and loved it, because he loves his blue bike!)Pink Pig - Ethan used a (new!) nasal aspirator to suck up pink paint and squirt and splatter it onto the paper - this was his favorite!Green Frog - Ethan used empty toilet paper rolls to dip in green paint and stamp circles onto the paper. He also discovered he could roll the rolls in the paint and roll them onto the paper as well, but he much preferred the stamping.Yellow Sun - We made a "puffy paint" using yellow paint mixed with some clear glitter glue and a few pumps of white shaving cream. Ethan loved to feel the puffy texture once the painting dried!Oranges - We realized we were out of orange paint, so we mixed together red and yellow. At first Ethan was annoyed, but then I let him keep adding more yellow until the paint looked orange.Purple Grapes - Do-A-Dot markerWhite Sheep - Ethan dipped white feathers into white paint and painted the sheep with the feathers. We also sprinkled some white glitter on as well.Black Bat - Ethan used a marker for this one. He typically doesn't really like to use markers, but that appears to be changing. He enjoyed doing this one, too!Brown Squirrel - This one was done in crayon, which Ethan had no interest in. Sorry, crayons.

Using EZPaint, Ethan also decorated a paper plate using "all the colors." We turned it into a very colorful rainbow hat which was only appropriate to wear throughout our color wrap-up!

I'm pretty crazily obsessed with this one dollar store in our area, because they have everything. And not just junky things (though they have those too), but really cool and useful things. During my last trip there, I stumbled upon these bunny peg games for just $0.50 and figured it was worth a shot with Ethan.

As it turned out, he loves this activity and is content doing it repeatedly throughout the day.

I also scored two bags of water beads from the same dollar store, 2 for $1. I'd been dying to introduce waterbeads to Ethan and figured this was a perfect opportunity. I used green since St. Patrick's Day was approaching at the time. Ethan calls them "bubbles" and absolutely loves digging his hands and feet into the squishy water beads!

5 comments:

Your mommy and baby caterpillars are SO CUTE! Thanks for linking up with Montessori Monday. I featured your post at the Living Montessori Now Facebook page and repinned your caterpillars to my Caterpillar-Butterfly Unit Study Board at http://pinterest.com/debchitwood/caterpillar-butterfly-unit-study/